The Green Slime (1968)

Famously promoted with the grammatically wonky tagline “The Green Slime are coming,” this joint American-Japanese co-production is routinely dismissed as one of he worst science fiction films of all time. But, although it’s certainly not a film that anyone can seriously defend with a straight face, it’s a ridiculous amount of fun (the emphasis very much on ridiculous) that just about overcomes the enormous drag factor of the terrible performances, cliched plot and awful monsters to somehow emerge triumphant as a very silly but undeniably entertaining bit of fluff.

The plot anticipates that of Michael Bay’s much less enjoyable Armageddon (1998) – and there are moments that foreshadow Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as the astronauts race around trying to track down and kill the monster that have invaded their ship. An asteroid has been detected that’s on a collision course with Earth. Curiously this potentially planet-killing rock is given the less-than-terrifying code name Flora but it’s deemed enough of a threat for the crew of the space station Gamma Three to set out to destroy it by burying nuclear bombs beneath its surface. The mission is a success but they accidentally bring back a sample of a living green slime that the find on the asteroid, a substance that mutates into an army of lumbering one-eyed monsters that kill by electrocution through their tentacles. As the rapidly reproducing creatures go on the rampage through the station, the crew fight a losing battle to maintain control of Gamma Three. Matters are complicated by the fact that the stations two most senior officers, Commanders Jack Rankin (Robert Horton, recently of TV’s Wagon Train (1957-1962)) and Vince Elliott (Richard Jaeckel, star of many a 50s and 60s western) are both competing for the affections of the station’s doctor, Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi from the Bond film Thunderball (1965)).

The genesis of The Green Slime lies neither in Japan nor the States but rather in a quartet of films shot in Italy by Antonio Margheriti, his so-called “Gamma One” series, four films set on the Gamma One space station: I criminali della galassia/Wild, Wild Planet, I Diafanoidi vengono da Marte/War of the Planets, Il pianeta errante/War Between the Planets and La morte viene dal pianeta Aytin/Snow Devils, all shot in 1965. The films had been distributed in the States by MGM who fancied a fifth film but this time producers Walter Manley and Ivan Reiner looked to Japan for inspiration, MGM setting up a co-production deal with Toei who assigned the project to Kinji Fukasaku, later the director of Yakuza classic Jingi Naki Tatakai/Battles Without Honor and Humanity, the science fiction films Uchu kara no Messeji/Message from Space (1978) and Fukkatsu no hi/Virus (1980), wild horror/fantasy epic Makai Tensho/Samurai Reincarnation (1981) and the late career classic Battle Royale in 2000.

Toei had been specialising for some time in “tokusatsu“, live action science fiction films with extensive effects sequences, and so the marriage seemed one made in heaven, Unfortunately there wasn’t quite enough budget to go around resulting in some low-rent, low-believability effects supporting a script Tom Rowe, Charles Sinclair and William Finger – who as Bill Finger had been one of the co-creators of Batman – that is, frankly, dreadful. The science is terrible, the dialogue as tin eared as it gets and the performances stiff but to his credit Fukasaku does sterling work keeping the nonsensical screenplay motoring along at a fair old clip and for all it’s many faults, The Green Slime always looks good – even the cheapskate special effects which have a certain charm about them. In truth they’re about par for the low budget science fiction course at the time and were certainly no worse than its impoverished Japanese and Italian contemporaries (are they really any worse than a lot of the Godzilla films of the time?) Sadly for Fukasaku and co, The Green Slime was released in the same year as 2001: A Space Odyssey and by the end of the year everything like this was going to look hopelessly dated and ineffectual.

The film’s real Achilles heel are its monsters which are utterly ludicrous and never convince for a moment. Played by children in rubber suits they flail about making silly squawking noises and electrocuting anyone within reach with their tentacles. They’re a pathetic sight and are somewhat reminiscent of the equally daft creatures that turned up in the two-part Space: 1999 second season opener Bringers of Wonder almost a decade later. They looked an awful lot better in the stills where their unsteady gait and wildly failing tentacles aren’t at all obvious. Their rampages prove to be unexpectedly bloody in places (in the UK the film got an ‘X’ certificate) with plenty of charred and twisted bodies, splashes of gore as falling bodies hit the deck and green ooze seeping from the monsters’ wounds.

Some have sneered at the supposedly cardboard sets but they clearly weren’t paying attention as the sets are certainly cheap and cheerful but never less than entirely substantial. The decor has a distinctly late 60s psychedelic tinge, a feeling only enhanced by the notoriously odd acid rock theme song written by Richard Delvy and sung by an uncredited Ricky Lancellotti who later briefly fronted Frank Zappa’s band and did time performing vocals for The Banana Splits (1968-1970). The bizarre lyrics (“Open the door you’ll find the secret/To find the answer is to keep it/You’ll believe it when you find/Something screaming ‘cross your mind”) actually features a rousing chorus of the title howled at full volume as heavy guitars and pounding drums rumble away in the background.

The wooden but deadly earnest performances are uniformly terrible. Horton and Jaeckel are dreadfully boring stiffs and it’s hard to see what the more sparky Lisa sees in either of them. The love triangle is about as hackneyed as these things ever get and tends to get in the way of the action – the film would have been a hit with kids in the late 60s who were unlikely to have sat still for the lovey-dovey nonsense while waiting for the silly monsters to turn up again. The extras, who all look terribly awkward and not a little embarrassed, were apparently rounded up from local US air bases and a handful of Israeli students who were called upon to fight in the Six Day War part way through filming.

The Green Slime has the dubious distinction of being the very first film lampooned by the reprehensible Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1998-2018) which only cemented its reputation of being a film that was deserving of nothing more than being mocked. No-one’s pretending that The Green Slime is some undervalued masterpiece but it certainly didn’t deserve the witless ridicule of the MST3K team. It’s a stupid film by any standards but it’s also a strangely appealing one – even the terrible monsters are charming in their dreadfulness and the plot certainly can’t be accused of dragging its feet. 2001 it’s not – but if you’re in the mood for something decidedly less cerebral and more underachieving – and who amongst us hasn’t had days like those? – then The Green Slime might just fit the bill.